Adolfo Chavez and Adan Pinales
Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua
achavezr@avantel.net Ground-water recharge rates are dependent on environmental factors such as climate, soil, vegetation, physiographic features, and properties of the geologic material through which water flows. The assessment of ground-water recharge is of the utmost importance for water resource management, but the difficulty of its direct measurement in the field has led to the use of hydrologic models to estimate its magnitude and spatial variability. Furthermore, no field data is usually available to estimate the annual variation of recharge, and the estimation of the annual changes by hydrologic models is often quite unreliable. However, under certain conditions, the spatial distribution of average annual recharge rates can be estimated reliably for ground-water management purposes. In this paper, we present the results of the estimations of average annual recharge rates using land-use as the main criterion for zonation of the areal recharge in 15 ground-water flow models that were constructed for the same number of ground-water management regions in central